Thermos H. Christ

Smashing Pumpkins being amazing at the Siamese Dream release show in 1993:

Remember in 2016 when Trump won an election that no other GOP primary candidate would have won by going to the rust belt and pretending to be Michael Moore? Promising affordable universal health care and generally presenting himself as the champion fighting for the interests of the working class over the big businesses who sold them out? Predictably, the Trump/Ryan/McConnell machine has done nothing except reduce access to healthcare, favor big business over workers and consumers, and generally do their very best to make life harder for poor people whenever possible. Bernie also did pretty well in the rust belt/midwest primaries. That's why the good people of the DNC, after absorbing the hard lessons of their unfathomable pants-shitting faceplant in the 2016 election, have concluded that populist candidates have no chance and the party's only hope of returning to relevance is running tepid corporate-owned centrists (ideally a Kennedy or a Rockefeller or somesuch if possible) and being "civil." Now that the highest-ranking Dem in Congress got primaried by a left-leaning populist, they're doubling down and telling us that we might as well just give up on ever winning the midwest if such people are even going to have a seat at the table in a hypothetical Dem congress. Because they so clearly have their finger on the pulse of that region. How did these become the only viable options? And how hard did the Simpsons nail it on this one (DNC vs RNC) lo those many years ago?

Poor Ron Paul just accidentally keeps putting his name on wildly racist stuff. Weird. Even if he honest-to-goodness had nothing to do with any of it and it was all employees and aides putting stuff out under his name, perhaps he should examine why he has these racist people around him and speaking on his behalf. Then again, at least it's honest. As if anyone warning against the evils of "cultural marxism" is not primarily concerned with maintaining the supremacy of the white Anglo-American heterosexual male in all possible spheres of existence.

And there's already going to be more on-the-job learning than one would probably like, just because basically nobody has experience being the President. I'm sure there's a lot of concepts that carry over from being the governor of a state but it's most definitely not the same job. Pretty much everyone who's ever been in a position to comment, including Trump I believe, has said that it's harder than they figured it would be.

Of course everything is not about race. But race is a thing. Enough of a thing that people categorized as being different races often don't have the luxury of just acting like it isn't. How willfully dense do you have to be to think hundreds years of slavery and systematic official oppression, not to mention widespread and pervasive prejudice, just vaporized in less than the space of one lifetime and everything got reset to zero where it's a level playing field?

Alt-left is like, twitter tankies, not Bill Fucking Clinton. e: Also most of the women in the vagina yelling picture look like they'd be attractive when not actively making a rage-shout face.

I do fine, not 1% or anything but comfortable. Professional, very low 6 figures, homeowner, all that. It’s not about me personally deserving more. I have plenty. Now. I didn’t always. It’s not about what I personally need anymore. It’s about all the people who don’t have what they need. It’s about wanting to live in a society that’s better than this. It’s about not being another useful idiot making $100k who has been suckered into thinking they have more in common with the billionaire class than with people who make $25k.

This is the least depressed I’ve felt about politics in at least a year.

Don’t stop. They’ve felt untouchable for so long. They’re not. They need to know that. They need to know we’ve got them surrounded, hundreds of millions of us, and they who have for so long been insulated from the consequences of their actions are starting to feel a little smaller and more human and vulnerable right now. Keep going everybody. Don’t let up. And let useless fucking go-along-to-get-along Democrats hear from you too. How fucking shameful is it that a handful of pissed off people have brought more consequences to bear on Trump and his collaborators than the entire Democratic Party? This has gone far enough. They need to feel the heat. All of them. Every day.

Nobody ever went broke telling older Americans to be terrified of the world beyond their driveway.

Kind of the whole disease we see in our voters/media/political class. Too many think the political process is about something other than the real consequences of policy (and rhetoric) in the real lives of human beings, and it really shows.

As to the Republican party shirt that didn't reference Trump, if I were a restaurant owner I don't see myself telling someone they have to remove it or leave, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it would be unethical. As to whether that would be "out of line," to me it would probably depend on what kind of business we're talking about and who the clientele/employees are. If someone wears a pro-GOP t-shirt and gets turned away by the bouncer at a NYC gay bar then that doesn't seem out of line at all, the t-shirt wearer is the one who is out of line. If it's a gas station in LA and they're telling someone they can't fill up because of their GOP t-shirt (or damn near any t-shirt), I would personally consider that unreasonable. With the family member thing, I was kind of building in the assumption that reasoning with them had previously been tried and failed. And that it would also naturally be a part of whatever discussion there would be about actually you are not invited to Thanksgiving this year. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say people have some moral/ethical obligation to do that. Biting your tongue while relatives say reprehensible/racist shit is a longstanding Thanksgiving tradition in itself, after all. But I wouldn't blame anyone who did, either.

The truly amazing thing is, I'm still not sure we know. We know it wasn't the pretextual reasons they gave. It was and is blatantly obvious that they were doing everything they could to make a case for something they already wanted to do, meaning they knew that the real reasons they wanted to do it wouldn't persuade the American people or even the meager number of allies we managed to bring in on that. I think the most likely answer is simple imperialism, they thought they could create a friendly client-state that would control extremely valuable resources and deal with us on favorable terms. Potentially also had to do with W having a personal desire to finish something his dad started. Or to bring about the final battle of Armageddon and set the stage for return of Christ - remember that in W's era fundamentalism/evangelicalism was HUGE and very politically prominent. W being on a mission from God and needing to go to war to fulfill prophecies was a small but very real part of the overall conversation in the leadup to that war.

Tweet roundup of folks saying it better and pithier than I would:

I would stop short of businesses refusing service to people just voting R, although I don't know how a business would even know something like that. If it's the sort of thing a random business would be aware of, it's probably enough (e.g. prominent donor or somesuch). Certainly I think a business would be more than justified in telling someone they can't wear a MAGA hat on the premises, much like any other article of clothing that might reasonably be expected to make a meaningful number of patrons/employees feel offended, annoyed, or even threatened. But with mere voters, I think pressure is much more appropriate in the personal arena than the commercial one. Don't date/fuck Trump voters or supporters (already widely adopted in most metro areas, extremely common to see dating profiles saying Trump voters need not apply). Tell family members to, at a bare minimum, keep that shit to themselves or you're not interested in speaking to them. That stuff matters.

Don't forget anti-due process, which is a weird stance for people who apparently believe there is such a thing as a witch hunt

Remember when a comedian specifically brought in to roast members of the Trump administration told a joke referencing the fact that Sarah Huckabee Sanders (a) lies frequently and (b) wears makeup, and people acted like that was going way, way, incredibly too far? What the fuck was that?

I don't condone violence against Trump collaborators. In addition to just being wrong, violence would be counterproductive. This is right out of the Ghandi/MLK playbook. The blueprint for (a) winning hearts and minds and (b) effectively compelling social change is not violence but simply refusing to participate in or go along with something that one believes is wrong, and emboldening others to join in taking that stand. If someone is acting as a force against what is right, you don't buy from them, you don't sell to them, you don't work for them, you don't fuck them, and you stand in their way loud and proud at every opportunity. It's a lot harder than it sounds, but in the big picture it can be extremely effective. So yeah, I absolutely condone shunning, shaming, boycotting, and all-around excommunicating Trump collaborators from the society of decent human beings. They should not be able to get a meal at a nice restaurant or a drink at a nice bar in any major city in America. They should not be able to shop, or go to the movies, or walk down the street in peace without being told very clearly WE SEE YOU, AND YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. They should dread at all times showing their faces in public. They have more than earned it. The idea that they can expect to do everything they do with impunity and everyone's just going to sit there politely waiting for them to tell us when it's OK to respectfully request that they stop... THAT is insanity. It's also insane to think that they face so few consequences for their actions through official channels that not getting to eat at a farm-to-table restaurant is being portrayed as some whole new level of bridge-too-far leftist insanity. It's nothing, and yet it seems to be the closest we've come to actually hitting them where it hurts. It's working, this is really getting to them. It must not stop, it must grow, it must become their day-to-day and hour-to-hour reality.

The National Enquirer was an arm of the Trump campaign? You don't say.

It's genuinely astounding and fairly terrifying the extent to which team Trump has effectively convinced a huge swath of the country that reporting on the doings of the Trump administration is, in itself, a partisan act of opposition politics. And media outlets have internalized that shit. They give Trump and his people a pass on things purely because they do so many shitty things. Because if you call him out too often, too consistently, you obviously can't be considered credible. So it generates this insane false equivalence and ultimately a slant in favor of Trump and the worst parts of his base. Sure, Trump is not even being remotely subtle about promoting his use of immigration and asylum policies as a form of ethnic cleansing while literal Nazis cheer him on, but let's have another handwringing NYT op-ed about how politics have gotten so uncivil, and really if you call people racist just because they are you're part of the problem. Because the lack of civility clearly comes from people who get outraged by racist shit and rampant corruption and toddlers screaming in cages, not Donald Grab Em By The Pussy Shithole Countries Immigrant Infestation Lock Her Up Trump and his vast army of shit flinging fuck-your-feelings monkeys. Or maybe this week we should revisit how college students protesting reactionary shitheads just might be the real threat to liberal values.

It's about to get soooooo much wooooorse

Well of course he does. Why should anybody be allowed to tell Donnie no, to anything, for any reason?

Uh huh. Sure. Just like how all those brainwashed liberals pitch a fit when you go to the open mic night at your neighborhood coffeehouse and play a few lively banjo numbers while wearing some whimsical clown makeup. Black people don't actually look like that, so clearly anyone who looks at that makeup and sees a racist caricature of a black person is revealing their deep-seated racism. Right? Because everything you do and say is in a vacuum. You're just innocently closing your eyes and punching the air, if anyone gets hit that's not on you.

Got my tickets to Camp Cope/Petal at Barracuda on July 12. I went to Red 7 a few times but I don't think I've been since it changed hands. Very pumped, at the moment Camp Cope is probably top 3 on my list of current bands I haven't seen but want to. Don't know why they're not headlining, but Petal's perfectly fine too.

Yeah dude totally the entire idea of "context" is a liberal conspiracy. Nailed it.